A Comparative Study Of "X-Gate" And "X-门" In Terms Of Memetics

Watergate scandal, a political scandal during the 1970s, led to the resignation of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, making him the first and only U.S. President that has resigned. Thanks to its great influence, Watergate scandal had made a profound influence on American history, politics and as well as a far-reaching influence on language. William Safire, the conservative New York Times columnist and former Nixon administration speechwriter, promoted a great trend of–gate term coinage, quickly enlarging the"-gate family". At the very beginning, in the United States, -gate expressions referred exclusively to scandals involved with high-level officials. Later, through evolution, any events, as long as bearing the power of making a sensation among the public, can be named after Watergate and appended with"-gate". Meanwhile, through language contact,"X-gate"expressions entered into China and was literally translated as"X-门". And later through semantic generalization,"X-门"in China has shifted its referring field from high level officials and other important figures to common people, its original referring field from serious politics to civil life. What's more,"门"can now serve to mean any stirring event, even events bearing little derogatory feature.The thesis attempts to make a comparative study of"X-gate"and"X-门"from the perspective of memetics. Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. As to meme, according to Dawkins (1976), is a unit of intellectual or cultural information. Blackmore (1999) holds that whatever is copied and transmitted from one person to another person can be called meme. According to The Selfish Gene written by Dawkins (1976), a strong meme has the following three features: copying-fidelity, fecundity and longevity.In the thesis, the author collects a large number of"X-gate"and"X-门"from the Internet, attempting to make a comparison of X–gates and X-门from the three features of successful meme put forward by Dawkins (1976). Through careful classification, generalization and close analysis, the author finds that the semantic meaning of both X-gate and X-门have shifted; X-门are more productive than X-gate; and X-gate are, generally speaking, more faithful to the initial"-gate"compared to X-门from the perspective of referring field , status of the referent , referring event and construction form, showing higher copying-fidelity; in the long term, X-gate might enjoy greater longeivity than X-门.As far as the author concerned, this thesis is the earlier attempt to compare X-gates and X-门from the perspective of memetics. There is no doubt that there are a lot of shortcomings and the author hopes that more people will conduct research on X-gate and X-门and find more differences between them. Hopefully, it will offer a more comprehensive picture of the development, current application domain and senses of X-gate and X-门, making a little contribution to X-gate/门study and offering some reference for future studies on other borrowed quasi-affix, like -bar (吧) , -show (秀), super-(超) and etc.